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American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) Revised ed. Edition

by Lyle Campbell (Author)

3.7 7 ratings

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Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies.

There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition.

Editorial Reviews

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"Campbell's book can serve both as our manifesto and as our textbook."--Language in Society

"This is an excellent book, an extraordinarily useful volume for anyone whose work and interests involve languages of the Americas or, more generally, the methods and results of historical linguistics....This is a true and thoroughly authoritative handbook."--Mother Tongue

"It's the kind of book I wish had been available when I was a student and would have saved me many long hours and fruitless searches in libraries....It will be used for a long time to come and well after the furor about Greenberg has died down."--Margaret Langdon, University of California, San Diego

"A wealth of useful information is provided....The author has compiled and sifted information from a vast area of scholarship, making this as complete and up-to-date a guide to this subject as one could wish."--Choice

About the Author

Lyle Campbell is at University of Canterbury.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Revised ed. edition (September 21, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195140508
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195140507
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.68 x 7.56 x 1.11 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,308,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,287 in Anthropology (Books)
- #5,233 in Linguistics Reference
- #10,539 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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Smallchief

Scholarly. Difficult. Conservative.

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2007

About every branch of science has two types of people: the "splitters" and the "lumpers." The splitters are those who separate everything (plants, animals, etc.) into many different groups and doubt they are connected or related. The lumpers find reasons to believe that everything is related. So it is with languages. A linguist named Greenberg grouped all American Indians languages on both continents into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dine (i.e. Apaches), and Eskimo-Aleut. That's a lumper at work.

By contrast, Campbell, the author of this book is a splitter, finding reasons why North American Indian languages are not related. He asserts there are dozens -- maybe over a hundred -- American Indian language families which are either unrelated or a relationship cannot be proven. Who's right? I don't know, but it makes for heated debate -- and the correct answer is important the who, where, when, and how of the first people to inhabit the Americas.

The virtue of Campbell's book is that he briefly discusses virtually every American Indian language and language family, including those that are proposed but unproven. This sounds pretty dull and technical and beyond the comprehension of the average reader. So it is -- if I qualify as an average reader --but through the fog of technical linguistic discussion comes some wonderfully interesting speculations. For example, how is that two small tribes in northern California speak languages that are related to the Algonquin spoken by dozens of tribes thousands of miles away in Canada, the Great Lakes, and the eastern United States. Did the Algonguins originate in California and migrate eastward? Or the reverse? And, how is that the Uto-Aztecan language family can encompass Indians from El Salvador to Nevada and include both the urbanized Aztecs and the simple hunting gathering groups of the desert?

Campbell imparts an enormous amount of information about American Indian languages and their relationships with each other. He discusses the history of American linguistics and the techniques linguists have used in attempting to establish relationships among languages, and he examines the many theories of linguistic relationships, refuting Greenberg and the other lumpers in detail. One of the better features of this 500 page book are maps of tribal locations and linguistic families. Want to know the name and something about the language of the tribe that inhabited the region of Brazilia? Look up the Xakriaba. "American Indian Languages" is not easy reading but as a thorough reference book I doubt that it is matched in its field.

Smallchief (Kansa tribe, Dheghia language group, Siouan language family)

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Thomas Martin

Excellent overview of all the known families and major proposals of families in the Americas.

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2014

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This is an ambitious book, considering that there are so many linguistic families in the Americas, far more than in Europe or Asia, more than in Africa, more even than on New Guinea. But Campbell handles this huge task as well as he could, considering that he wants to fit it all into only 512 pages.
Three of the chapters list all the known families and isolates in the Americas, providing for each family a list of languages, often grouped according to some subgrouping, mentioning where some languages are located, in some cases providing a list of phonemes of the proto-language, mentioning what families each family has often been linked with. Though at least in case of the alleged Paezan stock, he puts the stock among these families, even though the stock is far from proven, as he himself admits. He also puts Otomanguean family there, claiming it is proven, though I consider it an unproven family.
Then he has an excellent chapter assessing the faulty methods used to try to relate families to each other, when the evidence is really insufficient. This is followed by a chapter evaluating in some detail several of the more popular unproven groupings, and assessing some other proposals. He gives also his assessment of the probability of each proposal being true, and how confident he is of the assessment. For most of the proposals, very little is given here, after all, he has to fit it all into one book.
He also has a chapter on linguistic areas, showing for each area what are the typological linguistic features of the area.
In general, it is a very useful book, a good contrast to the lumping of families together that some linguists have tried to do. After all, the Americas are not like Europe or Asia, where huge conquests have eliminated much of the former linguistic diversity, and so only a few families and isolates are left. Or in Australia, where some ancient conquest, maybe due to the ancient invasion from India, has resulted in most of Australia having only one family, Pama-Nyungan. The Americas have apparently never had such large conquests (until the recent conquests from Europe), so the rich diversity of families and isolates has been preserved, except of course some languages are already extinct due to the European conquests, and Campbell notes for each language whether it is already extinct. But not unexpectedly, languages which became extinct without science getting any linguistic information about them, are usually not even mentioned, as nothing can really be said about them besides location.

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